Dawn
by HarvestedHeart
Summary: The Communist revolution begins in Konoha, pitting Loyalists against Communists as each scheme to bring the other down, tearing Konoha apart. Sakura, field medic, daughter of Kakashi, stands on the side of life, not knowing which side that is. Sasuke craves chaos to bring him closer to vengeance. Itachi lies in wait. Pairings include Naruhina and ShikaIno.
1. Prologue

**Hello and welcome to my first fic based around the idea of a Communist revolution! I expect that's not a phrase you normally hear, but this was an idea that wouldn't stop nibbling at my ear. In some ways, the style of writing is based very much on Markus Zusak's ****_The Book_****_Thief _****and some inspiration was also drawn from Diane Setterfield's ****_The Thirteenth Tale, _****to give credit where credit is due. **

**Also, if anyone has ever read the fanfic Red by Sherbet Mayhem, based loosely on The Book Thief, I would like to say that it also gave me some idea to put this into words. Read it, it's really all that and a bag of chips.**

**So, enough of my yammering...if you stuck through that, let's carry on with the show!**

This is the story you've been waiting to hear since you arrived on my doorstep covered in blankets and coats, shivering from an inner chill that would not leave your tiny hearts. Ever since I saw the both of you, I decided to shield you from tragedy, and that includes this. I wanted to save you despite myself, and it hasn't been easy. Those sets of clear blue eyes pleaded with me all this time to speak, to reveal, though neither of you ever truly knew there was a hidden tale that I had taken, a tale that had played parts in your lives. Selfish of me, but I thought to extend your innocence for a while longer. I played a thief with truth and this is my comeuppance.

You are going to know. Consider this my gift.

By the way, this is my story too, in some way. But I am only a subplot, a shadow snaking through the undertones of this tale. You will only know me once the story has reached its end. Keep that in mind.

* * *

The first character we meet is a young man by name of Hatake Kakashi. He is rich, young and foolish, thriving in the borderlands between youth and adulthood. But his life is changing, shifting and rotating the opposite way as a young girl with glowing, ember-like eyes walks down an aisle in white to meet him.

I like her. She, like me, is a subplot. But then again, we stood at different ends of time. She died before I took my first steps.

* * *

Hatake Kakashi had married Haruno Ayame young, when both had still been rich and foolish. He remembered her from the day she'd appeared in Konoha with her prodigious parents, her mother a stiff, authoritative mannequin, her father completely in thrall to the matriarch. In that sort of family, there were always squabbles that grew and morphed into feuds, with her parents having been ousted from the clan for some unknown reason.

Perhaps that was why she'd sought comfort in the first boy she'd seen. A quick escape must have been the safest plan.

It did seem a little rehearsed, her openly flirtatious gestures at him, stealing his Icha Icha to dangle it in his face, the lip-licking over any variety of food offered to her. But what had perhaps been the most genuine were the questions she asked him after they made love, two sixteen year olds in rumpled garments, lying in the summer sun.

"What do you think about the future?" Her long pink hair, tangled in grass and fallen leaves. Her features delicate and, for once, innocent, not a pretense of seduction in those large doe-like eyes, which were staring up at him like flickering amber flames.

He was speechless, suddenly feeling as though he was several decades older, staring at Ayame, bewitching, one-time Ayame, her guard down for him, only to find a child. A girl. He hadn't expected protectiveness to wash over him at the sight of her vulnerability, but then, he didn't know what he'd expected. Without makeup she had always seemed just a little softer…

"I think….I want to spend it with people I like."

Of course, he remembered the diagnosis. Her father, normally placid and jolly, shaking Kakashi's shoulders together furiously, as the matriarch of the Haruno family watched, her features arranged in a sort of contempt satisfaction. He tasted the bitterness in their voices as they surrounded him, an army of two.

He agreed to their ultimatum: Marry Ayame, or else. He didn't pretend to have any naïve thoughts about the Harunos not being powerful enough to perform "or else" satisfactorily. Of course, he was glad they hadn't said anything about giving up Icha Icha. That went without saying.

She had been about six months along the day he was drafted. The war with Kirikagure, after all, was a war that could not be ignored.

He left watching her smile and wave, and never saw the tears that came once he was gone. After all, one can either be a soldier or a husband. He couldn't do both at once, and, had he seen her cry, he might decide to stay. That wouldn't do. The army needed every last man it could get.

* * *

Years. It had been five years since he'd left.

Yes, I know I'm jumping around in time. I will commit this crime much more drastically in the rest of this story, not to miss out on details, but simply because it makes it easier for me. My knowledge is filled with gaps and potholes. Why should I be well-informed? I was not there when the Mist soldier fired a bullet that carved through Kakashi's left forearm, drawing strands of blood. I wasn't there when the bombs fell, and I especially wasn't there when Kakashi's daughter (who, by the by, becomes very important in this whole deal) opened her eyes for the first time. But I know what I know.

* * *

Blood in his mouth, Kakashi sucked at the gaping hole in his arm, waiting for the medics to get around to him. The tangy taste of so much at once made him gag, and the droplets of red flew down his mouth, mixing with the dirt.

He was trained, of course, much better trained than so many others. How else had he survived? He refused to believe luck had something to do with it. Luck was faltering and failing, uncertain. That wouldn't get him back.

Somehow, he had gotten into a competition to kill, kill as many of the enemy each day contest with another soldier. He hadn't taken it seriously, so it was a bit of a shock to see Marshal Gai out and charging, uniform stained with fresh blood every day as he shouted out death tolls at night.

"Perhaps it's the only thing that keeps him sane, turning all this into a contest. " A new voice, strangely cheerful, sounds from behind. Kakashi turns steadily, subconsciously preparing for an enemy, only to find a dark-haired Konoha Captain behind him, smiling as he stretches out a hand.

"Uchiha Obito." The smile seems to be genuine and warm, despite where and when they are. Perhaps that's what makes him take the stranger's hand and shake it, a similar smile playing along his features.

"Hatake Kakashi."

* * *

Of course Obito dies. I should've told you this wasn't a happy story. Oh well, I never knew too much of him anyway, but I can tell you he was lucky to die at that precise moment when the Mist soldiers created an avalanche of stone to break his regiment.

For if he had waited a few months to go on leave back to Konoha, his throat would have been slit so fast he would never have felt a thing coming. He would only have been aware of icy hands reaching for his neck, barely having any time to turn around.

This was the fate of that illustrious Uchiha family.

Well, most of them. Two brothers survived. One had stood over the bodies with the knife in his hand, silver and crimson glinting under a blood moon.

Obito gave Kakashi an eye as he lay, broken and bleeding, his bones crushing themselves to sawdust.

I thought that it was very nice of him, personally.

* * *

Kakashi found the boy during a rainstorm.

"Carry on! Carry on! Faster!"

What for? He thought, unsurprisingly.

What for?

We're all dying, and Kiri's too strong at the moment to be defeated.

They do something with those soldiers, train them to inhumanity… The Bloody Mist has a reputation well carved into time.

Maybe if you'd done that with us, we'd be better fighters…

They marched, no, drudged, past a tall steel gate covered in damp moss and ivy that twined in on itself. The gate was poorly made yet still standing, spikes devilishly protruding from its rusting, orange metal, a demonic barrier. Behind, flickering movements caught the corner of the eye that he had been given, an eye from Obito…...

His fault. His fault that Obito was gone. Shaking his head, he forced his shame out of thought. Survival was necessary, he needed to have the rest of his life to live with that guilt.

They were children. Both the soldiers fighting alongside him and the creatures that moved behind the gate.

Perhaps because of his own loss of one eye, that the bodily feature he obsessed over as he walked past them. Haunted, dull, glassy eyes, each one another color, another story, and yet all the same in the nothingness so apparent in those orbs, unifying them all. They were nothing, a ragged, starving majority.

"Penal colony." Marshal Gai whispered to him. "Shameless, but they take the youth who come from horrible families…place them here behind bars for their parents' mistakes."

As his borrowed eye washed over the children, he saw one boy off at the far right.

* * *

The boy has a name that will prove to you Fate does make plans, and surprising ones at that.

His name is Uchiha Sasuke, and he is one of two brothers and two survivors.

He was not the one who slit the throats, and yet the blood from that night still lingers.

It will taint him, but then, who could watch the deaths of parents, of cousins, and not wish for vengeance?

I sure couldn't.

* * *

Kakashi somehow, in some way, is able to break him out. I'll never know how, perhaps it was a silent entrance through the crumbling gate, an outstretched hand and a moment's pause before the boy shuffled off behind him. Or maybe it was some other way.

What I do know is that Kakashi saved the Uchiha boy for three reasons.

One, he remembers his own wife, heavily pregnant and waving from the doorstep. Their child would be the same age this year as the boy, and maybe he is growing soft, but he cannot help wondering if the boy needs someone as well. If he cannot ever go home to the child he has never met, he will help this one, the one that, age-wise, could just as well be his.

Of course he's not. Uchiha Sasuke's parents are Uchiha Fugaku and Uchiha Mikoto. Both are dead.

Two, he is lonely. Gai seems to have gone almost mad, shrieking and screaming in the night as he fends off imaginary enemies. Some men are shell-shocked, delusional, rocking helmets like squealing infants back and forth in the night. There's no good company to be found now that Obito is dead.

Three, he saw hopelessness in the eyes of the other children as he passed. Sasuke merely showed ambivalence as he glanced away from the soldiers, not paying them attention as they drudged past. He simply kicked a stray rock.

Perhaps the lack of hopelessness in those wine-colored eyes made Kakashi think there was still some will to live left in the boy. And Kakashi has never been a wasteful man.

* * *

He does have a will to live.

And it is to see his parents' murderer dead.

It's a bit of a complication that the murderer is his own brother, but he's been in a penal colony for the past few months after watching the blood drain from his mother and father, corpses lying in the snow.

He probably has enough rage and revenge in him for one man.

* * *

Kakashi teaches the boy to fire guns and write over the next two years out on the battlefield. He saves the boy's life three times, twice from Mist soldiers, and once from another Konoha soldier who screams something about his father.

The boy is most grateful for the gun-shooting lessons. His fingers meld to the trigger naturally, almost as if the sleek metal is the missing piece of his arm. This will be useful for him in more ways than one. Writing, not so much.

Kakashi becomes attached to the boy and eventually, with some coaxing and waiting (after coaxing entirely failed) learns his name.

He never really hears the boy's full story, but he doesn't need to know.

* * *

He returns with the boy to Konoha, back to the house where he last saw his child-bride with her protruding stomach waving goodbye to him. Hopes are dashed when he hears Ayame died in childbirth five years before, hemorrhaging gallons of life-blood on a doctor's table, screaming and praying for death rather than life in her last moments.

"My wife died and no one thought to inform me!" The anger in his tone, cutting as the bayonet slung around his shoulders seems not to impact the figures of his former in-laws. They do not even flinch.

"You were at war." Sarcastic, biting. Now that he's not their son-in-law, they can treat him as what he is to them. Their daughter's murderer.

They inform him that his money was used to pay off his debts. He is penniless and therefore, they continue, he cannot be trusted with his daughter.

As soon as he knows she exists, he wants to see her, badly. Does she resemble him? An innate parental curiosity to discover yourself or your loved ones in another skin, a skin formed in part by yourself. What have they named her? Will she want to see the man who is her father? Will she look away?

But he never gets to know, and only has a glimpse in the doorway of a pink-haired girl with inquisitive jade eyes staring at him with a mixture of awe and horror. Immediately after, the door is shut and their connection of seconds is severed.

* * *

And Hatake Sakura becomes Haruno Sakura legally, once Kakashi is forced to scrawl a signature declaring his parental ineptitude. She becomes under the care of the mannequin and the chubby dwarf once more.

Perhaps, to rub salt in the wound, they invite him coldly to attend each of her birthdays, if he arrives promptly and leaves before it is over.

What a sucker, he thinks, even as he accepts and walks out of that gilded mansion.

He raises the boy in her place, but he still does attempt to look in crowds, eyes darting back and forth, as he attempts to find the girl he fathered amongst other strangers.

* * *

Meanwhile, a man known as Nagato publishes a document that will play an direct role later on in this as it circulates amongst the Konoha lower classes, disgruntled and dirty, almost animalistic.

It is called "A Future Built on the Principles of Communism."

Around the same time, out of fear of the new doctrine, Marshal Gai and his six-year old daughter leave Konoha. Kakashi never hears from them again.

* * *

It's late. I can no longer speak tonight, you have already begun to whine and whinge, yawning at me out of sleepiness rather than boredom. You both need your rest. Off to bed and wake up bright and bushy-tailed. Yes, that is an expression, no need to roll your eyes.

Don't worry. I will carry this tale onwards, for both your sakes.

In the end, it may be the story you must carry on your entire lives.

**So...how'd you like it? This is a prologue, and I would really appreciate any and all feedback so I can make this story more enjoyable in later chapters. Please review and rate! **

**And, by the way, while this is somewhat Sakura-centric in later chapters, Naruto, Hinata, Lee, Neji, Shikamaru and Ino will all be making significant appearances, just in case you wondered. **


	2. Chapter 1: Chance Meetings

She smiles gently as she walks down the gilded staircase, moss-green eyes glinting off the finery, the shining world that surrounds her simultaneously magical and threatening. Lights flickered and the chandelier's wonderful, soft light radiated off every orifice, over bare shoulders left uncovered by gowns, over diamonds shimmering coldly at throats. She herself flickered in the lights, all set to focus on her, the diva, the diamond in tonight's diadem.

Her grandparents stood at the bottom of the stairs, awaiting her with an outstretched arm each. Her grandmother, the usual combination of stiffness and ferocity in a tight gown with a matching tight smile on her thin lips. Her grandfather with his kind eyes but bulging stomach, which seemed to almost pop the buttons of the expensive suit he wore... She hid a giggle through thoughts of "buttoning the lip" as her grandmother had preached on several occasions.

She is ten years old, but she has been taught well to be wise beyond her years, a sheep in wolf's clothing, for she knew that adults were, in some ways, like wolves, ravenous beings who barely disguised their lusts, for money, for power. The only way to succeed, to impress them, is to put on their garments and smile innocently while hiding yourself.

She is society's cream, the darling of the bourgeoisie.

As she descends, two faces in the crowd are magnified. A man with grey hair with black cloth covering an eye she screamed at last year, hideous and horrible, crimson and black. Childish, she knows, but it was scary.

Beside him, a pair of silently sulking ebony eyes stare daggers into her from a face so pale it almost appears corpselike….or not. It has the appearance of gauntness, yes, but there is enough life still left that it can pass for some sort of subhuman skin, reptilian, perhaps.

She cringes. It's not fair to think of the boy her age that way, as a subhuman monster, but she can't help it. For years, Hatake Kakashi….no, Father, she has to remind herself….has brought him to her birthdays, and he has always found some way to torment her with his presence, from merely sculking around, dropping quiet verbal barbs at her, or even locking her in the slaughterhouse for an hour one year….

She hates him, hates him for looking like the walking dead, for showing up and ruining her mood in front of so many. Seething, she decides that tonight, she will take revenge on Uchiha Sasuke once and for all.

She sought him out, a guided missile following its path subtly. Her tiny elbows jabbed, albeit jabbed gently, through throngs of wine-glass-holding men and women cheering congratulations to her. Their glasses seem almost black, tints of red like drops of blood barely showing through the translucent glass. Their eyes under the chandelier lights seem to be drained of energy, almost as if the presence of brightness seeped theirs, only showing the shadows of their souls, which were terrifying, and yet as natural as water seeping over grass.

She was neither thrilled nor saddened by the shadow-faces in her attempt to get to the other side of the room.

His eyes were perhaps the strangest in the crowd. Unlike the others, which were common shades of brown, green, gray, blue, his were a sort of ink-black, so dark that the almost crimson tint in them, so strikingly similar to the red wine in those glasses, startled her underneath scattering lights. As per normal, he stayed near her father, face maddeningly ambivalent as he looked around at grandeur that would make any regular person gape.

She wants him to gape.

No…she wants him to grovel, to scream.

She wants to know that there is someone behind that marble wall.

Sidling over to him, a façade of eagerness present, she puts her plan into action the moment those black and crimson eyes stare into her.

She asks him snidely if he is enjoying himself, suggesting in a whisper that if he continues to find her intolerable, she is sure he can remove himself to the pig-yard, where there will be adequate company for the likes of the proud Uchiha Sasuke.

He slaps her, very hard, so hard that her breath is released in a torrent of air, sudden and painful . I'd do the same.

* * *

Morning light is not soft. It is harsh, instantaneous pain behind closed eyelids; the sudden opening of a curtain is the wake up call to reality, where half-formed dreams and creatures of sleep, so familiar in their shared nonsense, come to die. It is the brain that is soft. The brain is a whining, peevish being that longs for those transient creatures despite the dawn. Perhaps this tendency of humans is the singular reason we continue to hope.

* * *

"Hinata…."She groans, shoving the blanket s up over her features, those green eyes still closed in protest. "Don't…"

"Up and out, Sakura-sama!" Normally shy, Hinata was a morning person to the greatest degree, which meant excess cheeriness in a time where this was not appreciated. Of course, it also meant that, purely based on time, she made incredibly good breakfasts. I never tasted them, but it's said she did.

A fine girl, Hyuga Hinata, a very pretty one. Her hair was so dark it was almost blue, and she had pale grey eyes, that instead of being watery, to quote a cliché, almost seemed star-like. Her body had undergone all the changes that the girl whose household she worked in as a maid, Sakura, had not. She was curvy and, if you were a man, she was probably a delicious-looking thing, especially when that body moved in walking, undulating slightly and seductively.

A real shame, what would happen to her. A most grievous shame.

She was, by nature, shy and modest, an innocent little girl dressed as a woman. She and Sakura are both sixteen now, by the by. I jumped in time again.

Sakura, looking closely at her serving girl and best friend's eyes, detected an unusual darkness below them. Smiling cheekily, the petite pinkette smartly gave a diagnosis.

"You were seeing your delivery boy again last night and don't bother to deny it."

Flustered, Hinata nearly pulled off the emerald curtains she held in her hands.

"You wouldn't tell your grandparents, would you, Sakura-chan?" She pleaded. "You know they don't like any 'dalliances' (here her fingers traced air-quotations, much to Sakura's amusement) between servants and any other members of society."

"What sort of monster do you think I am?" Sakura, stepping out of bed and into her fur-lined slippers, reached over and sleepily hugged her friend. "If he makes you happy, by all means, see him every single day. But I do wonder…why did you say no to Officer Inuzuka when he made the offer?"

Here Hinata seemed to tense slightly as she pulled away from Sakura, her hands focusing on the task of the curtain with such intensity that it seemed foreign.

"He…is very kind, and I wish Kiba-kun, as a friend, the best of luck. But...I don't care for him in that way. And…"Hinata paused as she proceeded to straighten the curtain so much it almost tore. "I was worried…for Neji-nii-san….if a police officer found out…."

The events of a week past suddenly washed over both mistress and serving girl.

* * *

"I wish to resign." Curtness, sudden disdain from the boy who worked in the Haruno family stables, Hinata's normally gloomy cousin Neji. Only days ago, he had been disparaging over his station in life, claiming it was fate that kept him bound to this position he so despised. And now, confidence seemed to pour off him in waves, a sudden disruption of the natural order.

What a smart boy. How admirable his next actions. I would have liked to have met him.

Her grandparents seemed echo Sakura's own surprise. Hinata, in the corner dusting, seemed to be caught in a wave of sadness.

Sakura's grandfather was the first to speak.

"How, might I ask, have you come to this conclusion? Are your wages perhaps not satisfactory?"

"They are fine." Neji's voice was again blunt, without any pretension. "I have simply found a higher calling, and wish to devote myself entirely to it without any distractions."

"And this higher calling? Are you becoming a priest?" Her grandfather seemed amused. The fatalistic one becoming the priest couldn't have made more sense.

"I'm joining the Communists."

Silence followed, but only for an instant before Hinata's tears could be heard and all eyes turned on her.

"Ha…ha…." She turned and smiled, water running in rivers down her pale face. "He means he wants to kill himself." She turned back to the curtain. "He means that his radical friends have convinced him it's the right thing to do, that he should want to die for the sake of a dead country…."

"Hinata…"Neji's voice finally sounded natural as he strode over, attempting to place a hand on her shoulder.

Rage-filled, unfamiliar crevices present near her eyes strained as she pushed the hand away.

"Why?" Cold fury, icy and strange in that formerly meek voice. "Why do you want to do this, Neji-nii-san? Is this your way of changing your fate? Choosing how and when you'll die? Because that's all you will be choosing. You'll die the way you always said you would, still lower, still not an equal!"

Her voice has become ragged and her breath comes out in short puffs. Sakura walks over, and in a moment of sensibility, gently led Neji out to the front door.

"That was a little stupid, telling that to them." She remarked as she held the oak door open. "It's not as if an industrialist like Grandfather would ever support his stable-boy's descent into Hell."

"It's just a political struggle."

"Same thing." Sakura quipped before suddenly returning to seriousness. "Keep Hinata out of this. You know she's afraid for herself and you. Everyone knows this revolution of yours can't remain nonviolent forever. Don't give her any trouble, and if you get hurt, don't come to her." The last few words come out as a vicious-sounding hiss, much to her amazement. "She's got enough to do looking after herself."

Neji nodded as he walked through to the porch, unsmiling and stern, not waving to Sakura or showing any desire to ever see the Haruno house again. Though, that, I guess, was only natural. Like any good Communist, he hated the bourgeoisie.

* * *

And now we turn to a different segment of town. This is where the starving gamble for their lives, where the ill slit their throats for hope of heaven, and where children grow into adulthood at the age of eight. A very different world than Haruno Sakura knew, for all her education and upbringing. Even a very different world from Hinata, who had been raised on the Haruno estate grounds.

This was a world where the strong survived. The weak were trampled underfoot in a classic study of nature. Uchiha Sasuke had belonged to this world after his family's death. And now, he and Kakashi were only a foot above these wretches.

Yes, yes, I'll get around to Sasuke. Is it my fault that I prefer the characters in this tale with some semblance of humanity?

We're going to follow a delivery boy, the one you may remember as being Hinata's delivery boy. He's blonde and tall, almost clumsy-looking as he runs through streets, attempting to avoid pickpockets no longer lurking in shadows, no longer afraid to be caught. He laughs loudly as he dodges them, thinking of it almost as a game, blue eyes giving some light to the alleyways.

His name is Uzumaki Naruto. He never knows it, but he is the illegitimate son of the deceased last Monarch of Konoha, Namikaze Minato through Uzumaki Kushina. She left him when he was barely out of infancy due to a sudden bout of illness, though some think she was poisoned. I'm more inclined to believe it myself.

Because he never knows that he should be the next ruler of Konoha for all but his dead mother's position, he finds his good-natured self leaning towards the Communists.

Joining them is the easy part. Just go to the Deer's Horn Tavern after hours and whisper into the knocker. Say you left your wallet here last night and want to come in to look for it. The door will open, and the meeting will begin when all are present.

Code, of sorts, is necessity. You never know if the police might be listening. And if you give even one warning that you're with the police to the Communists, they throw your body into the river, washing it down to Kumo, where no one will ever know your corpse.

Naruto passed, of course. He passed very well and now he's on a mission of sorts. The people at Konoha Night Clinic are known sympathizers with them, especially the head, Tsunade and her assistant Shizune.

He remembers the script, like any good actor, as he approaches the clinic, lit by its white paint in the middle of a darker street. He immediately begins to stagger and clutches himself, perhaps a bit too theatrically, but luckly, no police are about at the moment. Officer Inuzuka long left to deal with the matter of a body matching the DNA of his partner, Officer Aburame, washed up near Suna.

Naruto, still clutching himself, struggles along the way to the clinic and whispers, just loudly enough into the doorknob.

"It's no bother, but my stomach's giving me some trouble..."

The door slides open and Shizune's dark eyes stare with intensity. Her lines flow naturally as she carries out her end of the code.

"Come inside, please. Tsunade and I will be with you as soon with some medication."

_Come inside. We were both expecting you and your package. We have something in exchange, something new._

He passes through the simplicity of the white clinic easily. Despite the sterile lights, too bright, illuminating all too much, this is one of the last safe havens for the rebels. The ramen restaurant he had so liked had been one of the havens until the owner's daughter, Ayame was abducted by "thugs". Only when the Communists had been turned out, albeit gently, by the owner himself was Ayame, bloodstained and horribly quiet, returned. And she still trembled every single time someone entered the room she occupied, or so he heard.

You can break a man with torture, but to break a woman you need more than that.

Shizune pressed the package into his hands and ushered him into the room where simple sicknesses, such as headaches, ear infections, and stomach problems were cured. Raising a hand, she indicated he was to wait.

"Those pills should help."

_This is going to be useful. _

And off he goes, not racing this time but striding along the streets, package out in his hands back to the Deer's Horn, back to the rat hole.

* * *

Contents: One stack of leaflets covering several chrome guns, long and silvery, attached to leather straps. Boxes of bullets, unused, with the insignia of the police of Konoha on them.

And, strangely enough, one empty glass that once held a smattering of wine, judging by the color, the shining dark red stuff lining portions with a surreal light.

It is crushed later on; glass breaking musically against the floor of an apartment where cockroaches crawl and shouts are silencing the rest of the earth turning.

Oh well. It happens.

* * *

Kakashi has not forgotten his daughter so much as attempted to replace her with a surrogate son. He has raised (or at least provided a home to) Uchiha Sasuke, and he eventually begins to consider himself father of two, a daughter whose face is reminiscent of his own mother and her mother, and a son whose face has become familiar as the years have passed.

Like any good parent, he thinks well of both, never comparing except to think of how much Sakura's eyes are such direct copies of his mother's, while Sasuke's eyes recall instead memories of wartime and self-hatred.

He lives on a pension from the army, as Sasuke has gained the financial necessity to take up clerkship for a lawyer and in essence keeps himself alive on that. Their total budget allows for rent of two squalid rooms in what was once a manor, but is now a decrepit corpse, infested with bad memories, infants screaming, and an endless parade of seasonal vermin.

As Sasuke comes and goes, without a word, without any sign of being thankful for a life saved other than occasional, blank-faced statements about how it's cold out, Kakashi simply lives in the room.

He's not upset, he's practical. There is nothing he's missing out there, he's sure, and he would simply be a bother. He's become an old man while still into his forties. There is a kind of peace in this hollow tomb-like room where he sits and vegetates over old Icha-Icha he's already read thousands of times.

Their writer is dead and there will be no more books, no more sequels. The cliffhanger of the last book is the only ending, poor as it is, that there will be. He will have to be content with the old ones, just as he has to be content in memories of his own family, rather than their actual presence.

* * *

Sakura has grown up from the little girl who was slapped by Sasuke on her birthday. She's gotten feistier still, which may either be a good thing or a bad thing. She's tempestuous but calm, intelligent and idiotic, a collection of conundrums raised in privilege.

She's not especially beautiful, but she's attractive in a cocky, self-assured way, always laughing, always bright with that distinct hair, shining in the light. And she plays off her figure, though there is still not much of one, with clothes to draw attention to what she does have.

The only imperfection she does not try to correct is a large forehead, bestowed upon her genetically by her mother's father, that same chubby dwarf that runs five factories. She presents it to show that she is still flawed somehow, that she is still human.

After all, perfect things are always insubstantial, something Sakura has never wanted to be.

* * *

They meet again, her and Sasuke. You knew they would and I can tell you did. It's not hard to hide secrets from me, even the obvious ones. I can see you were even hoping they would.

Well, don't. They're not going to be good for each other.

Wait, no. They are good for each other. They shaped the other and will always coexist, were always meant to be a part of each other's life in many ways.

Destiny goes past good and ill.

* * *

It's raining, and droplets are pouring down, harsh and cold, unto the uncaring shoulders of Uchiha Sasuke.

He's become a man, and a very handsome one, they told me. His features had been almost sweet-looking in a sort of angry way as a child, had been genuinely sweet before the massacre of his family, and now he is a cold-looking sexpot.

I know, I know, it's an awkward choice in words. But blame Sakura. She was thinking it as she neared him on the sidewalk, her own umbrella with its satin shine glinting with the rain.

Of course, she started a little when he turned back, sensing with the heightened reflexes that the penal colony had given him that someone was behind. As those wine-colored eyes flashed before her, she identified him with shock and embarrassment before smiling coyly.

"Sasuke-kun! It's been so long…" She plays with her fingers, pushing strands of hair back behind her neck to expose a perfectly white neck. "Oh!" She feigns surprise at the dampness forcing down his hair and gestures to him to come nearer. "Would you like to share my umbrella?"

He comes closer and steps underneath the green folds of it.

Sakura mentally smirks, trying to stand closer to him, to present herself in the best lighting. She's been so bored, it's good to try and flirt with anything that passes by. Of course, it doesn't hurt that he's good-looking.

As she chatters incessantly and draws attention to the small perfections of herself, Sasuke wonders how women can be so incessantly stupid.

* * *

She's a babbling jade in his eyes, that's certain, with a head full of finery and expensive tastes that Sasuke finds repulsive. She has all the money, all the nessecary implements to become something, and the idiotic little girl has probably delicately sniffed it all away.

Not that he wants her riches. She can bloody keep those for herself, damn her.

How the hell, he thinks, can she be his daughter? He's perfectly sane and she's a clear blockhead.

He'd be ashamed of her. The thought surprisingly makes him smile through his drying skin. She takes it as interest and babbles on further, happily convinced that she's ensnaring him in some invisible trap.

Sasuke is too clever for that.

Oh well. It's not as if she's not a woman.

And a man and a woman…can always find something to do with each other.

**R&R please! I hope this isn't too "out there" for everyone. Also, thanks for reading and thanks to my friend for helping me develop this idea.**


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